Does OHSS affect pregnancy chances?

Currently I would have to say no. It doesn’t anymore. Earlier, let’s say 10 years ago when there was a risk of hyperstimulation, we had to freeze the embryos. This cryopreservation actually was quite stressful for the embryos. Only, let’s say, approximately 60% of them successfully survived the procedure and the success rates in the frozen embryo transfer cycle were lower than with the fresh transfer. Currently this is not the case anymore. The actual cryopreservation processes are very gentle, the success rates with the frozen embryo are the same as with a fresh embryo transfer and therefore, we can successfully avoid the ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. The transfer is postponed by perhaps a month, perhaps two but there is no reason to think that the chances to get pregnant would be negatively influenced by this. It just takes a little more patience on the side of the patient itself.

There is an increased risk of miscarriages if you’ve got severe OHSS. It also may reduce your ability to proceed with further treatment because you’re just so scared of such a horrific experience and we know that people have such a horrific experience with OHSS that they can’t even possibly consider doing IVF again. That’s an increasing drop out for that for many people. The vast majority of people, if they get OHSS it actually means that they were a good prognosis patient in the first place. Actually they’ll generally do very well from IVF, if they can proceed to having embryo transfers and frozen embryo transfers in the future.